Family Planning Association of India was established in 1949 and is a founder member of IPPF (The International Planned Parenthood Federation). With 40 different offices spanning the country, managing and streamlining the flow of information between different teams from each office and consolidating the same at the Head Office had become a challenge for FPAI. The MS exchange server (2007) and the GMeet chat application were turning out to be very expensive modes of communication. The need for an effective communication
Business Needs:
1. Prohibitive Costs of communications systems:
The soaring cost of running the e-mail communication systems was a major reason FPAI was looking for a new solution. Not just the high cost of monitoring the on-premise mail server, but also the running cost of electricity was a cause for worry. Mr. Mukesh Surve, Director of Information Technology at FPAI adds “We used GMeet for chat communication across offices. GMeet provided limited chat features and only 40 licenses i.e. only one license per branch. But frankly, what worried us most was the high cost of Rs.270,000 per annum. For an NGO running on donations from governments and individuals, this was an exceptionally high cost and a cause of concern for us.”
2. Space on Mail servers running out:
Mukesh also points out “Due to limited space in the on-premise mail server, users were being forced to back-up old mails on their individual machines. This method was old-age and worked when the organization was small with a few offices. But with 40 offices across India, the local back-up method completely localized data and e-mails and eliminated their access from outside the office environment.”
3. Data Loss and Duplication leading to compliance issues:
Users were backing up data/e-mails on their individual machines as there was no back-up policy or document management system in place. FPAI was running the critical risk of losing precious data completely in the event of a machine crash or any other calamity. Multiple versions residing in multiple drives across user’s machines/servers was leading to inaccurate information. There was a clear breach in compliance guidelines due to the unnecessary data-duplication. The e-mail and communication system used by FPAI had served the company well in the initial years but had now run the end of its life. FPAI was looking for a solution for its IT challenges which were slowing down productivity and growth. After searching various solutions offered in the market, FPAI zeroed down on Microsoft Office 365. Microsoft Office 365 was a complete package of everything that the FPAI needed. Over the course of its implementation, FPAI has realized some core benefits of switching to Microsoft Office 365.
Benefits
E-mail server: Robust and cost-effective with 600+ mailboxes:
By providing 600+ MS Exchange user licenses, Office 365 has enabled each FPAI employee to have their own individual e-mail id. This has been a significant achievement from the earlier 120 mailboxes. All this has come at a significant cost reduction.
The e-mail server migration from Microsoft Office 2007 to Office 365 has been seamless. Microsoft has delivered its promise of 99.99% e-mail server uptime. E-mail server outages, high-running costs are a thing of the past. A 50 GB mailbox space per employee has completely done away with local archiving of e-mails.
With Emails being delivered as a Cloud Service, the local Mail Server is now redundant. Employees can now access e-mails on the go on mobile/tablets as well. This mobility has led to enhanced productivity for employees.
The new Online Archive feature of Office 365 has ensured auto archiving of e-mails while keeping the e-mails online.
Skype for business chat server: Enhanced features, better connectivity and cost-effective
The new internal chat communication platform for FPAI is ‘Skype for Business’ that has lead to increased connectivity between offices. This application has several advanced features like video chatting facility.
With each user having access to Skype for Business Applications, this is projected to reduce overall costs as well.
Complete Document Management solution: Ample storage, Data consistency, Mobility and Data security
The Document Management Solution which is bundled with Office 365 provides 1 TB of space and has completely eliminated the space crunch.
Office 365 provides users ‘OneDrive for business’ which is a secure and reliable cloud storage solution. All users are encouraged to create and store their files in ‘OneDrive for Business’ to ensure data consistency and eliminate data duplication.
‘SharePoint’ is being deployed gradually at various Team sites. ‘OneDrive’ coupled with ‘SharePoint’ provides complete mobility to users as they can access information from outside office as well.
The solution also includes the ‘InfoPath’ application which will ensure automatic data-entry of a lot of critical data at each branch office. The data consolidation at Head Office will also happen with minimal intervention. Manual data entry and consolidation will soon be history for FPAI.
As part of this implementation, the Yammer rollout has also been kicked-off at FPAI. Yammer is the internal social media site bundled with Office 365. With Yammer going live soon, employees will feel encouraged to post suggestions, give feedback and even participate in games and polls.
Mukesh Surve, points out about the Office 365 migration “We are on Office 365 platform for more than 6 months. It has gigantically impacted our daily work as the potential of Office 365 cloud is enormous. This move would be unimaginable without the commitment from Microsoft and NASSCOM to non-profits like us. Special thanks to our Technology partner ‘TechGyan’ for providing incredible and patient support and ensuring we could utilize all features of the cloud based Office 365 solution to our benefit.”
Technology for Social Good
“Organizations like FPAI is doing wonderful work and touching the lives of millions of people” adds Suresh Ramani, CEO, TechGyan. “By helping FPAI increase their Productivity by over 30%, we at TechGyan are enabling FPAI to touch more lives with the same resources. And in our own small way, we are thus making a difference in the lives of citizens of India. And it sure feels good.“
